1. Avatar has recently raked in over two billion dollars. This is not as impressive as it sounds when you figure in inflation, but it is a lot of money. Also, Avatar is yet to be dethroned at the box office, and it looks as though it could be something even more historic before the day is out. I have accepted this. Avatar, like it or not, is a piece of pop culture history. It is right up there with Jaws and Star Wars and The Graduate and The Sting and The Ten Commandments and all those other really, really big movies. But why? Why is Avatar a big deal? I recognize that it is a big deal. Why is that the case? I offer up my reasoning, based on the general consensus among the blogosphere.
3 years ago, I read an article that featured James Cameron, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, and other icons of spectacle entertainment filmmaking, saying that 3D was the future of event movies. 3D, which has been around since the fifties, had thus far been only a gimmick used to try to bolster sales of otherwise awful films. The flagship for the new 3D movement was going to be James Cameron's passion project, Avatar. It would be the first film built from the ground up in 3D (rather than scanned after the fact, as every other example of the genre). It was supposedly going to be the first, greatest example of how 3D would go from annoying red and blue to changing the medium of cinema forever. It was in this sense that Avatar was coined a "game changer". In the spirit of The Great Train Robbery and The Jazz Singer, the movie was meant to change the way we view movies forever. Regardless of story, character, or any other quality factors, if Avatar was able to do this thing (change cinema forever) then I would be willing to accept its popularity.
The first question I pose is, was Avatar actually a game changer? Did the movie you saw in theaters change cinema in the same vein as the dawn of sound or color? Did it legitimize 3D as the second coming of entertainment, taking it from a gimmick to a vital piece of filmmaking that will become a future mainstay of film forever?
2. Let's, for a second, say you answered yes to the last question. I'm not saying you are wrong. Again, I haven't seen the movie, so I can't say one way or the other. But I will ask a couple of other questions and cite a few more examples.
In 1903, the biggest movie was The Great Train Robbery. It featured groundbreaking shot variances and was generally exciting, something film prior had entirely failed to be. For ten years it reigned as the world's most popular film. The Great Train Robbery also, however, featured film coloration. It was a process in which film was painstakingly colored. This wasn't color film. It was film coloring. Gun smoke was painted orange. A dress was painted red. The entire frame was not colored, but one vibrant color was added to enhance the scene. This is what is known as a gimmick. The Great Train Robbery also spawned many films that featured this coloring process. So, in a sense, it spawned two movements. It changed the way films were shot and sold, and it caused a few films to be colored. Of course, coloring film didn't last forever. Even long before color film came along, that process was long dead. However, when The Great Train Robbery came out, its impact was felt in that way as well.
Here's the parallel I am drawing. The Great Train Robbery is now historic, not for any cheap color effects (no matter how much they impressed audiences at the time) but because it was, without a doubt, the most exciting, impressively directed, and realistically acted film to date. Its coloring technique died, but its legend remains. What category here do the effects of Avatar fall under? Are we going to wear 3D glasses to the movies forever? Will 3D on DVD be viable? Did Avatar change how exciting cinema could be, or did it temporarily give us something new to look at that excited us because we had never seen it before? When we are no longer blown away by things all around us (early film audiences screamed when a train drove past the camera in a shot), will we just grow tired of wearing the annoying, color-dulling glasses (that get smudges on them if we accidentally touch them after eating popcorn. Smudges that don't go away for the entire movie)? Avatar has inspired a lot of people to re-do their movies in 3D (which kind of defeats the point, actually, as Avatar was supposed to be the selling point for ground-up 3D). Are these movies part of an eternal change, or part of a movement?
3. Avatar's price was once estimated in excess of five hundred million dollars. That includes advertising. Cut that out, and you still have a movie that cost around three hundred million dollars to make. Most studios would not be comfortable doling that out on just any project. Now that the technology is there, how expensive will it be for the next project? Will it cost around the same (it won't drop a lot just because it's been done now)? How willing will audiences be to shell out money for the next example of this tech? How about the example after that?
In 1927, The Jazz Singer brought sound to film. It effectively changed film forever, as only a few people like Charlie Chaplin were capable of keeping silent film going in the face of the audience demands for sound. The effects of the change have been well documented (directly by Singing in the Rain and indirectly by Sunset Boulevard). Chaplin wasn't just a stubborn person. There was a reason why he kept making silent films. You see, film technology wasn't ready for sound yet. Recording equipment was cumbersome, and cameras had to be moved into sound stages (and utilize huge microphones that were hard to hide in shots). Because sound tech hadn't advanced as far as film tech had, nearly half a decade of film was considerably less artistically interesting because of the advent of sound technology. Had sound come later, then film could have eased into the tech and everything would have transitioned much more smoothly.
District 9 cost 30 million dollars to make. That is a tenth of the cost of Avatar. A tenth. I know I'm repeating myself, but you could make TEN District 9's for the cost of ONE Avatar. However, District 9 was a huge hit. It is up for a best visual effects nod at the Oscars, same as Avatar. Also, because District 9 cost less, director Neil Blomkamp was able to try more difficult things with it. Do you think a studio would allow a 300 million dollar epic to intensely discuss Apartheid or take a new, upcoming actor on a fairly unique, often unlikable journey? Probably not. I understand that Avatar is simple because it NEEDS audiences to like it in order to justify its cost. However, do we want the future of cinema to do this? Do we want movies to sell out on story in order to justify bigger, more spectacular effects? If that is the case, Avatar is just the beginning. There will come a bigger, more spectacular film, and then another, and then another, and story as propped by the likes of Spielberg and Jackson (master entertainers whose work Cameron has yet to come close to) will die on the big budget film altar. I for one want to return to the days when the big movies out were Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars. For those who also wish for that, does Avatar point us in the right direction? Is it a step towards the storytelling that made those films enduring classics? Would a Disctrict 9 approach (cheaper, less financially risky, helpful for more intensity and more risk-taking) get us there better? Would flooding the market with District 9's or Avatars help film more as a medium?
4. I really don't mean to be a wet blanket with this whole Avatar thing. It is not my intent to be contrarian (I love being contrarian, but that is not my motivation here). I just think we've jumped the gun on calling Avatar groundbreaking. Any film with lasting significance has had some story to enhance with its legend. It just feels like the plot points of Avatar have all been tread over a million times. I've yet to hear a single person defend the film's story, characters, or ideas. The very definition of a gimmick is something, unnecessary to a good story, used to fix a bad one so we don't notice it is so awful. Can Avatar take 3D out of gimmick territory if it uses the medium as a gimmick itself? Can it be a game changer if all elements but one are the same game we've been watching for a hundred years?
I'm not saying anything about 3D. Toy Story 3 was ground up 3D, and I am very excited to see the possibilities presented by the master storytellers at Pixar (Up was the first film that helped me realize that maybe 3D was could be more than a gimmick). But does Avatar deserve all of the awards and the prestige and the popularity that it is earning? It is getting all of the recognition of a movie that has changed cinema, and yet I think we are all jumping the gun there. Time will be the judge of that, I know. But in thirty years, will we look back on Avatar as fondly as we do on Star Wars? Or even Lord of the Rings for that matter (people always forget that Gollum revolutionized mo-cap and Massive is still the standard for giant, epic battles)? Big filmmaking requires a big vision, that goes beyond just the tech. The Wizard of Oz wasn't even close to the first film to be shot in color, but I defy you to name a movie before it that featured the technology. Your remember Oz because it was a good movie, not just because of its popularity. I have not seen the film, so disregard the following statement, but I think there is as much truth behind Avatar's declaration that it has changed film as there was behind 2012's assertion that the world might end in two years. All things pass in time. Only true art lasts.
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